Artists and Spirit Mediums

My artistic masterpiece, created in 2 minutes on an iPad:
brown vista with blue things

As you may have gathered from previous posts, I am not a great fan of abstract or conceptual art. I can see the point of art that really grabs you when you look at it, or art that involves real skill - but when it is about painting a whole canvas the same colour, dribbling paint at random, or displaying a pile of bricks or an unmade bed, perlease!

It struck me recently that there is a parallel between abstract / conceptual artists and spirit mediums. There seems reasonable agreement that spirit mediums fall into two classes. There are the frauds who know perfectly well what they are doing is rubbish, but do it to get money out of the people they deceive, and there are the innocents who genuinely believe that what they are doing is genuine - even though their performances are just as worthless as the conscious fraudsters.

Similarly, I suspect there are abstract/conceptual artists who frankly know perfectly well they are producing worthless stuff, but sit back and enjoy the vast amounts of money thrown at them by the idiot but rich punters, and there are those who genuinely believe in what they do. Like the mediums, this doesn't make what they do any more worthwhile, but this section of the artistic population has no intention to con anyone.

And what of the glitterati of the art world - the gallery owners, the people with the big cheque books? They are the equivalent of the venues and audiences where the spirit mediums operate. Some know it's rubbish, but cynically make a profit, others are true believers, as deluded as some of the mediums/artists.

There you have it. The contemporary art world explained. The only difference from spirit mediums is that sceptics haven't turned their beady eyes and attacks on the art world. Yet.

In case you have any doubt that the art world is deluded, I leave you with a story told in Paul Bloom's book, How Pleasure Works:

David Hensel submitted his sculpture, a laughing head called One Day Closer to Paradise, to an open-submission contemporary art exhibition at the Royal Academy in London. He boxed it up with its plinth, a slate slab, for the head to rest on. The judges thought that these were two independent submissions, and they rejected the head but accepted the plinth.

Comments

Why I hate opera

If I'm honest, the title of this post is an exaggeration to make a point. I don't really hate opera. There are a couple of operas - notably Monteverdi's Incoranazione di Poppea and Purcell's Dido & Aeneas - that I quite like. But what I do find truly sickening is the reverence with which opera is treated, as if it were some particularly great art form. Nowhere was this more obvious than in ITV's 2010 gut-wrenchingly awful series Pop Star to Opera Star , where the likes of Alan Tichmarsh treated the real opera singers as if they were fragile pieces on Antiques Roadshow, and the music as if it were a gift of the gods. In my opinion - and I know not everyone agrees - opera is: Mediocre music Melodramatic plots Amateurishly hammy acting A forced and unpleasant singing style Ridiculously over-supported by public funds I won't even bother to go into any detail on the plots and the acting - this is just self-evident. But the other aspects need some exp...

Murder by Candlelight - Ed. Cecily Gayford ***

Nothing seems to suit Christmas reading better than either ghost stories or Christmas-set novels. For some this means a fluffy romance in the snow, but for those of us with darker preferences, it's hard to beat a good Christmas murder. An annual event for me over the last few years has been getting the excellent series of classic murderous Christmas short stories pulled together by Cecily Gayford, starting with the 2016 Murder under the Christmas Tree . This featured seasonal output from the likes of Margery Allingham, Arthur Conan Doyle, Ellis Peters and Dorothy L. Sayers, laced with a few more modern authors such as Ian Rankin and Val McDermid, in some shiny Christmassy twisty tales. I actually thought while purchasing this year's addition 'Surely she is going to run out of classic stories soon' - and sadly, to a degree, Gayford has. The first half of Murder by Candlelight is up to the usual standard with some good seasonal tales from the likes of Catherine Aird, Car...

Is 5x3 the same as 3x5?

The Internet has gone mildly bonkers over a child in America who was marked down in a test because when asked to work out 5x3 by repeated addition he/she used 5+5+5 instead of 3+3+3+3+3. Those who support the teacher say that 5x3 means 'five lots of 3' where the complainants say that 'times' is commutative (reversible) so the distinction is meaningless as 5x3 and 3x5 are indistinguishable. It's certainly true that not all mathematical operations are commutative. I think we are all comfortable that 5-3 is not the same as 3-5. However. This not true of multiplication (of numbers). And so if there is to be any distinction, it has to be in the use of English to interpret the 'x' sign. Unfortunately, even here there is no logical way of coming up with a definitive answer. I suspect most primary school teachers would expands 'times' as 'lots of' as mentioned above. So we get 5 x 3 as '5 lots of 3'. Unfortunately that only wor...

Search This Blog